Cooperation in the Hungarian Dairy Sector: Results of Empirical Research

Szabó-Szentgróti, Eszter – Szakály, Zoltán – Borbély, Csaba – Szabó-Szentgróti, Gábor

Keywords: strategy, dairy sector, collaboration, B2B survey, Q13

The main goal of this paper is to explore the features of the Hungarian dairy co-operation. This research was based on corporate primary data, started from the total population (code: TEÁOR 1051). After a multi-stage cleaning process of the total population and a filter question application, 26 companies were included in the sampling frame. All survey data were verified by CEOs. We determined that the Hungarian dairy sector has very few cooperation forms and mostly it entails membership of professional organisations. Cooperation forms are typical mainly for procurement than for sales and marketing, and R&D partnerships are completely missing from this market. Despite this, the market is open to be involved in cooperation in the future. Cooperation is attained mostly with Hungarian partners in a formal way, but at the same time partners are mostly not competitors. The main goal of these partnerships is costs reduction. A positive effect was observed between cooperation existence and financial performance. But at the same time, financial performance will not improve by increasing the number of cooperatives. During the interviews it became clear that modern management skills are mostly missing from this sector.

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